Assignment of Web Addresses: Short URLs

WPI departments and offices, and certain interdisciplinary programs, are eligible to shorten the URL of their main homepage. The form of a short URL is:

http://www.wpi.edu/+keyword

Note that the keyword may not contain spaces or the / character, and is case-sensitive. Acronyms should be capitalized, while single words (such as "physics") should be in lowercase. Because keywords are case-sensitive, care should be exercised in their selection. For example, if the keyword is "library," www.wpi.edu/+library will work, but www.wpi.edu/+Library will fail.

Each department may be granted one short URL; multiple requests will not be considered. Requests for short URLs should be submitted using this form. A full list of current short URLs is also available.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR DEVELOPERS: A major limitation of the short-form URL is that it does not work in conjunction with NAME anchors in a document. For example, the following link to the Undergraduate Catalog will not work properly:

http://www.wpi.edu/+ugradcat/bbcourses.html#bb2950

Note that the link takes you only to the top of the page referenced, not to the correct point on that page. Because of this, you would need to link the page using the full path:

http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/Catalogs/Ugrad/Current/bbcourses.html#bb2920

When linking to the page in a document, you would not use the http://www.wpi.edu portion of the URL.

Maintained by webmaster@wpi.edu
Last modified: Jan 10, 2005, 10:39 EST